Vietnam. Văn Khắc Chămpa Tại Bảo Tàng Điêu Khắc Chăm – Đà Nẵng [The Inscriptions of Campā at the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Danang]. By Arlo Griffiths, Amandine Lepoutre, William A. Southworth and Thành Phần. Ho Chi Minh City: VNUHCM Publishing House and Center for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies, and Hanoi: École française d'Extrême-Orient, 2012. Pp. 288, plates,

Abstract

Van Khac Champa Tai Bao Tang Dieu Khac Cham--Da Nang [The Inscriptions of Campa at the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Danang] By ARLO GRIFFITHS, AMANDINE LEPOUTRE, WILLIAM A. SOUTHWORTH and THANH PHAN Ho Chi Minh City: VNUHCM Publishing House and Center for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies, and Hanoi: Ecole franchise d'Extreme-Orient, 2012. Pp. 288, plates, 38 colour illustrations. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000253 Since the Second World War stopped activities of the French scholars in Vietnam, Campa (or Champa) history was long neglected. The Chams as an ethnic minority within Vietnam had few, if any, opportunities to study their own past during the civil war and few scholars paid any attention to the ancient history of the region before the end of the twentieth century. The last decade, however, has shown a rapid renaissance of Campa studies. The history of the ancient kingdoms of Campa, so far generally viewed through George Maspero's courageous narrative Le royaume de Champa (1928), was the topic of two major international conferences. The first, 'Workshop on New Scholarship on Champa', was held at the National University of Singapore on 6-7 August 2004, while the second, 'New Research in Historical Campa Studies', was held at the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient (EFEO) in Paris on 18-19 June 2012. Chams themselves held a conference on contemporary issues in San Jose on 7-8 June 2007. These conferences reveal considerable efforts to reconstruct the complex socio-economic, political, linguistic, religious, and cultural processes of Campa and Cham history. The early history of Campa has been reconstructed on the basis of ancient inscriptions left by numerous rulers and dignitaries. These inscriptions were written in Sanskrit or Old Cham and have been found throughout Central Vietnam. French scholars of the late nineteenth through early twentieth century (Etienne Aymonier, Abel Bergaigne, Louis Finot, Edouard Huber, Paul Mus, and George Coedes) discovered, partially transcribed, and in some cases translated nearly 174 inscriptions, paying relatively more attention to those composed in Sanskrit. An Indian historian, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, reproduced all published texts in Devanagari script and translated into English those texts which had been published with translation into French (Ancient Indian colonies in the Far East: Vol. I. Champa. Book III: The Inscriptions of Champa, Lahore: Punjab Sanskrit Books Depot, 1927). But a synthesising catalogue with reproductions has never been published. Majumdar entirely omits reproductions in his edition whereas the French epigraphists normally did include them, but their publications always concentrated on small groups of epigraphic records. Moreover, they were not sufficiently proficient in the language to carefully translate Old Cham inscriptions, or indeed to translate them at all. Fortunately, since the end of the twentieth century, the epigraphic study of Campa inscriptions has once again started to attract scholarly attention. Anne-Valerie Schweyer, Arlo Griffiths and William Southworth published several recently found inscriptions that could not be used in the historical syntheses by Maspero, he royaume de Champa (1928), Majumdar (1927), and Coedes, Les etats hindouises d'lndochine et d'Indonesie (1948); and The Indianized states of Southeast Asia, ed. W.F. Vella, trans. Susan B. Cowing (1968). Now Arlo Griffiths, Amandine Lepoutre, William Southworth and Thanh Phan have published a catalogue of Campa inscriptions from the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Danang (Bao Tang Dieu Khac Cham Da Nang) as a part of the EFEO project 'Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campa' (http://isaw.nyu.edu/publications/ inscriptions/campa/index.html). Fortunately, it contains beautiful black-and-white pictures of all inscriptions included in the catalogue as well as colour photographs of bases, pedestals, and steles on which these texts are carved. …